Personality Progress

Myers Briggs Math – calculating functional preferences and ordering

The meat of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator comes in when you begin to analyze the Jungian Cognitive Functions. More depth can be gained from MBTI by learning to calculate jungian functions by type. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what functional preferences a certain type will have. To do this procedure it requires that you know which type a person is first. I’ll use myself as an example. Once you get this process down it can be used backwards to discern a MBTI type.

ENFP

Because ENFP is an Extroverted type the attitude of the preferences can be discerned as follows:

Xe – Xi – Xe – Xi

The first preference will be Extroverted since it is an EXXX type. The pattern as illustrated above switches between Extroversion and Introversion. This pattern is common among all 16 MBTI types.

Find the dominant function: EXXP

The next step in figuring out a types functions is to combine the E/I and P/J. For ENFP we get EXXP. Since this type is extroverted and perceiving that means the first extroverted function will be a perceiving function XNXX. Since we know the introverted / extroverted functional ordering (Xe-Xi-Xe-Xi) we know that the first extroverted function is the first function. We can now combine XNXX with Xe. That leaves us with: (E + P) + XNXX = Ne

Ne-Xi-Xe-Xi

The next function for this example will be a judging function since we started with a perceiving function.If we started with a judging function (Feeling or Thinking) the next function would be a perceiving one (Intuition of Sensing) Because we’re using ENFP as an example the judging function is XXFX, feeling.

Ne-Fi-Xe-Xi

The inferior function (fourth function) is always opposite of the primary function. The opposite of Extroverted Intuition is Introverted Sensing. So that leaves us with:

Ne-Fi-Xe-Si

Since all types use all functions, Intuition, Feeling, Thinking, and Sensing and I don’t have a thinking function yet in the functional ordering I must place it in the last spot: